Articles manufactured by series production, particularly packaged articles such as bagged candy, bagged ice cubes, and the like, are often dispensed into a storage compartment of a refrigerated ice dispensing unit located in a store. Machines for making ice and delivering bags with loose ice cubes may be deployed in supermarkets. Such machines are designed with a top part with an ice cube machine and a central packing machine packing the ice cubes loosely in bags, and a lower part with a storage compartment from which the filled ice cube bags are supplied as the customer opens an access door to the storage compartment, providing himself or herself with a desired number of ice cube bags.
One problem with many such machines is that the bags fall down into the storage compartment over the same position. Over time, a stack of bags forms a pyramid. This causes the storage compartment to be badly utilized as it can only be partially filled, resulting in low capacity for a storage compartment of a given size. The pyramid of stacked bags rapidly reaches the top of the compartment, so bags cannot be added until some are removed for purchase. The problem has hitherto been solved by the staff in the supermarket performing a manual leveling of the ice cube bags in the storage compartment at short intervals.
Bagged ice dispensers or storage compartments may be dimensioned with a relatively high capacity in order to cope with peak loads. These may occur, for example, in connection with festivals or other events, or when the outdoor temperature rises suddenly because of change in weather. Ice making units of such dispensers may be unable to keep up with demand on such occasions, and stores then typically have bags of ice delivered by refrigerated trucks, requiring store personnel to transport the bags of ice from the truck to the storage compartment.
Both manual leveling and re-stocking of refrigerated ice dispensing units is a problem due to work safety considerations that limit the time in which the employees are allowed to work with frozen products, and a desire to release the employees' resources for other purposes in the supermarket.
Applicant's US Pat. App. Pub. No. 2012-0070264 describes a method and apparatus for distributing articles such as bags of ice into stacks in two side-by-side rows extending across the storage compartment or freezer compartment of an ice dispensing machine. This alleviates some of the problems encountered in prior art bagged ice dispensers. This apparatus has an article support which is moved in a first, horizontal direction back and forth above the two rows, and which is also rotated between first and second positions for dispensing articles into respective rows.